Bands I wish I'd been in #6 - The Pop Group

Born out of the debris of The Avon Soul Army and the catalytic impact of seeing The Clash and Sex Pistols early on in the nascent punk scene. The Pop Group swiftly took the punk rule book and ripped it up. Incorporating funk, free jazz, dub and punk soundscapes. The original band featured Mark Stewart, John Waddington, Simon Underwood, Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith. Their heady combination of James Brown, Albert Ayler, Funkadelic and King Tubby mixed with radical lyrics was a complete headfunk for a teenage suburban punk like myself. 

Their debut single 'She is Beyond Good and Evil' was the most searing combination of potent punk/funk and poetic imagery I'd ever heard. These boys were different to anybody else on the scene. This was followed by their debut album 'Y', which covered all the bases (and basses). The relentlessly funky chaos of 'We are time' & 'Thief of Fire' interspersed with dub piano melancholy of 'Savage Sea' - the album beautifully underpinned by Dennis Bovell's production work.


Then came 'We are all Prostitutes' the song that sold thousands and the (bootlegged) t-shirt that sold millions....

They then followed up with a second album 'For show much longer do we tolerate mass murder', an album that was even more political and featured The Last Poets and Mark Springer. An album that was pilloried by the likes of the IPC owned NME but still stands up as a fine piece of work - albeit not quite as remarkable as 'Y'. In amongst all this activity was a formal bootleg LP 'We are Time'... And then came the most joyous slab of Funk to come out of the UK in the 1980's - 'Where there's a will' b/w 'In the beginning there was rhythm' but the equally unconventional and fabulous The Slits.

The first incarnation of The Pop Group played their last gig at the CND march in Trafalgar Square in 1980 in front of half a million people. The gig featured old and new versions of the band and they finished with a version of 'Jerusalem', which to those of us present took on almost magical properties (We having sprinted through traffic whilst 'We are Time' ricocheted around the heart of London). It was a remarkable/shambolic day...

So, why do I wish I'd been in The Pop Group? Well apart from the songs, the free form mindset, the lyrics, the amazing iconography, the willingness to challenge the musical 4/4 status quo of punk (which very quickly simply reverted to rebel posturing, boring guitar solos and appropriating the language of tired old cock rockers), the courage to wear their politics on their (LP) sleeve and the desire to SEEK - they were the most dynamic live act I'd ever seen! 

Postscript.
I was initially concerned that their return in 2011 would tarnish their name. I had no need to fear - live they are still an astonishing proposition and I did finally get to fulfil my ambition at Komedia in Brighton a couple of years ago. Mark Stewart thrust the mic forward for me to sing... 

"Where there's a will, there has got to be a way..."

Excelsior!

Mark Fisher RIP

Sad news from the UK is the passing of Mark Fisher, cultural theorist and inspirational music writer. 

Fisher's influential K-Punk blog was widely admired and wide read. Fisher used a cultural theorist's perspective to examine underground and mainstream music, from his original fascination with Roxy Music and The Jam through to Burial, via Japan and Rufige Kru. He was also a founding member of Warwick University's Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit (with musician and label boss Kode9), and a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths in London. 

In 2004, Fisher released Ghosts Of My Life, a book that covered a wide range of topics and shared his personale mental health struggles. The book also explored Fisher's ideas on "hauntology," which is a method/theory of understanding the world when culture has lost momentum at the "end of history." 

"Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis)possession, the inevitability of dyschronia," Fisher wrote in a blog post in 2006. "I repeat, I re-cite: hauntology is the closest thing we have to a movement, a zeitgeist, at the moment (and one of the uncanniest aspects of it is the fact that there seem to be very few lines of explicit influence among the artists involved)."

Fisher followed up in 2009 with Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? Which argued that since 1989 capitalism had portrayed itself as the only valid economic-political system. 

His final book The Weird and the Eerie was published in January 2017. His loss will be keenly felt by many, not least for the that fact that the most recent book he was working on, had a truly mouth watering title Acid Communism. One can only dream...

A fund has been set up to help his wife and son. Please donate if you can.

Mark Fisher Fund